Poll Watch: Ipsos, 23rd June
Pollster: Ipsos
Sample size: 1,180
Fieldwork dates: 30th May – 4th June 2025
Source
Key points
Only 4% of under 35s are voting for the Conservatives.
It’s misleading to say that Reform is the party of the uneducated.
The economically insecure are overwhelmingly in favour of Reform, while mortgage owners are voting Labour.
There are many reasons to pay attention to Ipsos. For one, chief executive Kelly Beaver predicted before the General Election last year that
“There are some who say we may see during the next couple of weeks some of the polls coming out with Reform having a higher vote share than the Conservative Party themselves. I think we are going to see a moment like that and there will be a lot of coverage of it, I’m sure, because some of the polls at the minute only have the Conservative Party polling two per cent ahead of Reform.”
This prediction, made on the 9th June 2024, was to come true less than a week later (13th June) when YouGov put the Conservatives on 18% and Reform on 19%. Since then, it feels like the gap has only grown.
But even so, it’s hard to overstate the significance of this poll - and there is a huge amount to dive into.
It’s the first that Ipsos has conducted since their re-launch following the General Election last year. The fieldwork was undertaken before the Spending Review (indeed, quite a while ago), so the impacts of that must be discounted and instead we should focus on the likely causes leading up to the fieldwork:
1,185 people crossed the channel on the 31st May, the highest this year so far (courtesy of Migration Watch). Alongside this, news reports were circulating of £7bn being spent on housing asylum seekers.
By the end of May, the economy was not performing well: GDP had fallen by 0.3% and inflation was not moving at 3.4% - partly a consequence of US tariffs.
Towards the end of May, there were protests across the country, especially in the major cities, intended to express major discontent with the current state of the country.
No doubt Ipsos wanted to make a splash, but it’s probably a bigger one than they intended - and the data only lies as far as we want it to.
Electoral Calculus is, as always, a useful tool in projecting how far a poll would translate to a parliament, and this one is certainly the most stark we’ve seen since the election:
Six seats for the Conservatives. Six. I doubt this will translate into reality, but it should terrify the Tories that one of the biggest pollsters in Britain could be predicting this. Meanwhile Labour is cut down to a third, and an unassailable Reform majority emerges.
In fact, this would be the largest modern parliamentary majority. Tony Blair’s New Labour won a majority of 179 in 1997, which was the largest since 1945, and ensured that the Labour Party was able to stay in government even as their public standing declined.
Be sceptical, as ever, but especially when it comes to the SNP. As the below graph shows, Scotland’s voting patterns in this poll put the above seat counts into question:
With the SNP at 41% in Scotland, it’s worth re-running the numbers using Electoral Calculus’ Scotland formula:
This would put Reform at still an unassailable majority, but - due to Labour’s significant presence in Scotland - means Labour falls only further while Reform’s majority would still be enormous. If the SNP really are going to take home 41% of the vote in Scotland, and then their parliamentary presence actually becomes this high (51 seats), that would make them the third largest party.
But really the key point is Reform’s total dominance everywhere, except for Scotland (and even there, is a comfortable second) and London, both of which make sense. The aggregate of voting intention across England is consistent with the level of support that Reform experiences in Scotland and Wales, while the Conservatives and Labour enjoy quite a bit more support in England than in Scotland and Wales.
Moreover, Reform is taking more support in the Midlands than the Conservatives and Labour put together - that statistic, or at least close to it, keeps occurring, which means that the pattern is hard to deny at this stage. However, Ipsos’ regional categories don’t delve into the granularity that some others do, and so some of the important distinctions between, for example, the South East (Kent, Sussex, etc.) where Reform are doing well, is not distinguished from the South West (Cornwall, Devon, etc.) where the Liberal Democrats and the Greens are emerging as the “challengers” to the Tory rural dominance.
The major statistic in this crossbreak is the fact that amongst under 35s, there is a three-way race between Labour, the Greens, and Reform - and in that order, with the Liberal Democrats following closely at 17%. The real alarm bells for the Tories here should be ringing over the fact that only 4% of under 35s are saying they would vote for them.
Likewise, the traditional Conservative voters - the “old vote”, over 65s - seem to have abandoned them, in favour of Reform, who are leading by a significant amount in this age group, at 40%.
I’ve said it, and I’ll keep saying it - the fact that Reform are outperforming every party amongst women is going to be a major determinant in the outcome of a future election. I have a suspicion that there is a growing association in the public consciousness between mass migration (which is Reform’s major policy issue) and women’s public safety - my point here is not that that is true, but that there is likely to be a major association between these issues. If that’s the case, the party that is going to try and resolve that tension will win women voters.
Meanwhile, the only party that has more support amongst women than amongst men are the Liberal Democrats, which is a really interesting dynamic, especially because the Lib Dems’ policy platforms are almost the diametric opposites to Reform’s.
Moreover, the Tories having only 11% of support amongst men is clearly a gulf yawning under the party now. If they are losing male voters, who have been their mainstay for the last thirty years, to Reform, then they may well disappear as an electoral force. The Conservatives’ having nearly twice as much support amongst women voters is a complete reversal of the situation over a decade ago.
The usual story is that right-wing populist parties are the home of the uneducated; this sample both confirms and challenges that. Given that the “no qualifications” respondents (which is a tiny subset of 118, i.e. 10% of the sample) are overwhelmingly in favour of Reform, it would be easy to say this trend is confirmed.
However, given that then the “other qualifications” sample, which includes people who leave school at GCSE, went to college, took an apprenticeship, or received A-Levels (which is the largest subset of 410, and therefore the largest set of voters), are also overwhelmingly supporting Reform, this trend is complicated and challenged.
It is clearly lazy to say that Reform is the party of the uneducated, but it is also accurate to say the more educated you are, the less you support Reform (and the more you support Labour, the Greens, and the Lib Dems, for what it’s worth). Even so, Reform is outperforming the Tories amongst the university-educated; this is also a serious challenge to the Conservatives because it only exacerbates the trend that more educated voters do not support the Tories.
This was a particularly revealing crossbreak to look at: amongst those voters who outright own their property, the Conservatives perform well, but that is the only subset where they perform well. Their record of failing to support renters or renting reform in their time in governance might be at fault here, just as traditional socio-economic factors could be the major determinant here (owning property is more likely to result in a vote for the Conservatives).
People living with a mortgage are leaning more to Labour than any other party (32%), but only marginally compared to Reform (29%), which is confusing given that interest rates are holding high and the housing market is not performing particularly well. Moreover, these are more likely to be people in their mid-30s to the early-50s, while the “outright owners” are those who are in their late-50s or have retired, usually - this tracks with older voters leaning towards Reform. Notably, the “outright owners” are the largest subset in this crossbreak, at 356 (roughly 25%).
The real stand-out stat here for me is the “social renter” support for Reform, at nearly half (49%) - when we look at the typical demographics of these people, it makes a lot of sense:
They’re usually older (with an average age of 53)
Most of them are white (80% or so).
Almost all are British or Irish nationals (91%).
There is a high rate of economic inactivity (24%).
This is a voting base that is usually drawn to more radical parties in a time of economic insecurity - it’s only a small subset (94, less than 10%), but it is still revealing for how the more economically insecure are responding electorally to a rising cost of living crisis.
Another fascinating crossbreak was the distinction between those voters who are satisfied with the government (which, just to be clear, is 16%) and those who are dissatisfied (76%).
As we’d expect to see, satisfied voters are highly likely to vote for the government again, at 67% - but what is striking is that then 18% say they intend to vote for the Liberal Democrats. It’s not entirely clear what the government needs to do to win those voters back - perhaps it’s a distinction over transgender issues, where the Lib Dems have embraced the issue while Labour’s been torn in two over it, but that is yet to be revealed fully.
Meanwhile, amongst the dissatisfied voters, the picture is more complex: nearly half (45%) are considering voting for Reform, while the Tories are only expecting to take 18%. There are 11% of the dissatisfied who are quite clearly the die-hard Labour voters, who will vote for them regardless, yet the Lib Dems’ support amongst dissatisfied voters is half of that amongst the satisfied.
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